Personal Growth and Development

If you want to know the key to the long term of success of your business it is simple – recruit the RIGHT people and GROW them! Grow your people and they will grow your business.

Use the following ‘DEVELOP’ formula.

D = Development Process

Alongside your Performance Management Process put in place a Personal Growth and Development Process. At the heart of this process needs to be the completion of a Personal Development Plan for each employee.

The Plan should include:

Areas for personal development identified from the Performance Management System

Measurable personal growth objectives

Identification of key learning and development activities to deliver the objectives

Agreed monitoring and measurement process

E = Engage

Employees need to be excited about their personal development and encouraged to invest time in their learning and growth. In other words they need to be engaged.

To be engaged they need to:

Understand the importance of their contribution to the business

Understand their value to the business

Understand the excitement they can experience from growing their natural gifts and talents to give them more job satisfaction

Know how committed the business is to their future growth and development

Commit to really engaging with their personal development plans

V = Vision

Employees need to understand the vision of the business and have a vision for their role in the business.

The corporate vision needs to be made meaningful to all employees who should be encouraged to answer the questions:

What does the corporate vision mean to me?

How can I achieve the vision for my life within the corporate vision?

How can I build my personal vision into my personal growth and development plans?

E = Empower

Empower employees to access and use a wide variety of personal development resources.

These can include:

Courses and workshops

Personal coaching

Books, articles, CDs, videos etc.

E-Learning; mobile learning programmes

Online learning and development resources

External programmes

Create a Learning Resource Centre supported by a Learning Management System so that all employees can easily access and use the widest variety of learning and development activities.

L = Learning Organisation

Be a Learning Organisation committed to the growth and development of your people. Publish this desire, openly reward the growth in employees’ knowledge and skills by offering credits to be used to contribute to a qualification.

‘You make the difference so we will help you make a bigger difference.’

O = Opportunities

Open up new opportunities for personal growth and development.

Here are some ideas:

Arrange a job shadowing activity

Arrange a secondment

Give the employee a project management responsibility

Allocate them to a task force looking at new and innovative ideas to improve the business

Involve them in the start-up of a new operation

Seek new opportunities to involve employees in their personal growth and development. Stretch them, excite them and show you believe in them.

P = Potential

Try to realise every employee’s potential. They probably don’t know their own potential and you as an employer certainly won’t. So work together on fully developing their talents.

‘The best get better at what they already do well!’

Involve them in development centres to spot abilities you have not seen and they didn’t know themselves!

Push people to take themselves out of their comfort zone but be supportive! See how they react in new surroundings. Practise what you preach – everyone, top to bottom of the organisation needs to be seen to be realising their potential.

Publish success stories.

Summary

So that’s it – The DEVELOP formula if taken seriously will seriously DEVELOP your people and your business.

Remember – ‘if your people grow and develop, so will your business!’

To find out more about this topic contact me or join me at Jeremy Francis HR
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